- Joined
- Jan 11, 2007
- Messages
- 4,366
- Reaction score
- 3,445
- Gender
- Female
- Political Leaning
- Centrist
I want equal rights and justice for all.
Do you?
Yes, and that cannot happen when you force women to be incubators. A zef is not a part of "all", it is not a member of society in any way.
When Abortion Was a Crime
If Roe v. Wade were to be overturned and abortion made illegal again, the history of when abortion was a crime suggests that the results would be dire indeed. The practice of abortion might dip in response to pressure, but it would not stop. Women would once again besiege physicians and other health-care workers with requests for abortion. Enforcement of new criminal statutes would no doubt be patterned on the old system. State authorities would again expect medical personnel to assist the state by reporting, interrogating, and physically examining women suspected of having abortions; police would revive the practice of raiding abortionists' offices and capturing women. Any woman who miscarried would be treated as a potential criminal and subjected to medical examination, which could include internal "viewing" via ultrasound. Medical mistreatment of women would become routinized as the health-care system became further enmeshed in the state's law enforcement apparatus. If abortion is made illegal, some women will die; many more will be injured. The old abortion wards
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
― 250 ―
will have to be reopened, a public-health disaster recreated. Making abortion hard to obtain will not return the United States to an imagined time of virginal brides and stable families; it will return us to the time of crowded septic abortion wards, avoidable deaths, and the routinization of punitive treatment of women by state authorities and their surrogates.
However, the past will not be duplicated in every detail if abortion is again made illegal, for the historical circumstances differ. In the last twenty-five years, abortion has been politicized in new ways. We can anticipate the "private" enforcement of the laws by the antiabortion troops that now harass abortion providers and women who seek abortion.[14] Women could be routinely prosecuted and imprisoned for having abortions, which they were not during the era of illegal abortion.[15]
It is not impossible to imagine women in the United States being subjected to constant state surveillance of their reproductive systems similar to that recently experienced in Romania.[16] The monitoring of female menstrual cycles, investigation of miscarriages, and the transformation of prenatal care from checkups to checks that all pregnancies are progressing to term are conceivable in the United States. With the rise of an antiabortion movement that proclaims the primacy of the fetus, prenatal care and medical thinking have already moved in the direction of putting the fetus ahead of the pregnant woman. Too often pregnant women are perceived as vessels for ensuring the best outcome of a future child. The obsessive focus on the behavior of pregnant women allows Americans to overlook the social and economic roots of this country's high infant mortality rates as well as the general population's difficulty in improving its eating habits or eliminating smoking and alcohol and drug abuse. Some women have been charged with "child abuse" of a fetus in utero; others have been surgically delivered by cesarean section against their will. Predictably, it is mostly low-income women, minority women, or women who hold religious views different from those of their doctors who have been charged or forced to undergo such surgery.[17]
Discounting the rights of pregnant women weakens everyone's rights as patients. If a pregnant woman cannot reject a cesarean section—whether for religious, political, or personal reasons—then any woman can be forced to submit to procedures deemed necessary for the fetus; any patient can be forced to comply with treatments deemed essential by medical personnel. This society rejects the sacrifice of one person in order to save another considered more important; an organ may be do-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
― 251 ―
nated voluntarily, for example, but donations may not be obtained through coercion. Reproductive rights are based on the same principle: women cannot be required to sacrifice their own health and lives in order to produce babies.